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Tutankhamen and the Glint of Gold
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Steven Snape |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The legend of Tutankhamen's tomb is one of the greatest myths of archaeology. When Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter stood at the opening to the tomb, they had little knowledge of the sensation their discovery would cause around the world and for centuries to come. Indeed, the whole dig was nearly cancelled after five years of searching, but luckily Howard Carter's commitment and Lord Carnarvon's finances meant they continued for a little longer--just long enough to discover the entrance to the tomb. In this feature Dr. Steven Snape, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, looks at the discovery of this tomb for an Egyptian king. |
 or Howard Carter the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen was the culmination of a 30-year obsession with ancient Egypt; his life was never to be the same again. |
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| Howard Carter crouching at the doors of the second of the three shrines that enclosed Tutankhamen's mummy and sarcophagus. The seals had remained unbroken for over 3,000 years. With him are his assistant, 'Pecky' Callender, and an Egyptian foreman. | |
The son of an impoverished Norfolk animal painter, Carter (1874-1939) was an outstanding excavator and draughtsman, but a solitary, irascible man of little formal education. Dependent for much of his career on aristocratic patrons, he began work as an artist at the age of 17 copying paintings on the walls of the rock-cut tombs at Beni Hassan for the pioneer British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith. A year later he had his first taste of excavation under the direction of Flinders Petrie, appropriately enough at el-Amarna, the short-lived capital founded in upper Egypt by Tutankhamen's probable father, the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (d.1337 BC). |
In 1899 Carter was made Inspector-General of Monuments of Upper Egypt, an important new post in the Egyptian Antiquities Service. A similar appointment in Lower Egypt followed, but he was not to retain this post for long; in 1905 a brawl at the burial ground of Saqqara near Memphis between drunken French tourists and Antiquities Service guards ended with Carter ejecting the tourists by force. Affronted, they demanded an apology through the French consul in Cairo; Carter, with characteristic obstinacy, refused to provide one and resigned. |
An experienced Egyptologist with negligible employment prospects, Carter was now lucky enough to meet George Herbert, fifth earl of Carnarvon (1866-1923), a languid and immensely rich English aristocrat whose early love of racehorses and fast cars had given way in middle age to an equal passion for archaeology. Carnarvon had dug in a small way at Thebes in 1907, but soon realised that he needed a professional archaeologist like Carter to provide his work with credibility and technical direction. For five years (1907-11) Carter and Carnarvon together excavated in the private cemeteries on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, extending their work to the Nile delta in 1912-13. |
The delta excavations proved disappointing, so the acquisition in 1914 of one of the most sought-after excavating concessions in Egypt, that of the Valley of the Kings, was doubly welcome. Carter began work in the valley in 1915-16 by clearing the known tombs of Amenhotep III and Hatchepsut, but by 1917 his activities were focused on the search for just one tomb, that of Tutankhamen. |
Since no burial place was known, Carter concluded that the pharaoh's hidden and probably unrobbed tomb must exist somewhere nearby. Five barren years later anyone less cussedly determined and less well funded would have given up the search, but Carter persuaded Carnarvon to continue the concession for just one more season, offering to pay for the work himself if need be. He wanted to investigate the only remaining undug area on the floor of the valley, a small triangle in front of the tomb of Ramesses VI, left until then so as not to disrupt tourist access to the tomb. |
The excavation season began on 1 November 1922. Three days later, beneath ancient workmens' huts, Carter found the first rock-cut step leading down to Tutankhamen's tomb; the following day he located the plastered blocking to the entrance and wired Carnarvon in England to announce his discovery--a sensation soon to grab headlines the world over. Finally, on 26 November, Carter, accompanied now by Carnavon, broke into the tomb and gazed into the antechamber--one of the great moments in the history of archaeology. |
At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold--everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment--an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by--I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously 'Can you see anything?', it was all I could do to get out the words 'Yes, wonderful things'. |
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| Linen-shrouded jackal, symbolising the god Anubis, guarding the entrance to the Treasury. Behind lies the gilded shrine that contained Tutankhamen's viscera. | |
More wonderful things were to follow for the antechamber was just one of four principle rooms heaped, as Carnarvon wrote, with 'beds, boxes and every conceivable thing'. The burial chamber itself proved to contain the mummy of the pharaoh encased in three coffins, the innermost of solid gold, as well as a massive quartzite sarcophagus and three shrines of gilded wood, one inside another. |
Once the initial sensation had died down, Carter was left with the problem of how to deal with so stupendous a find. Money--some £36,000--came from Carnarvon and an exclusive, though politically maladroit, newspaper deal with The Times of London. Carter was also able to put together a formidable team of specialists from museums around the world, notably the photographer Harry Burton from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and from Cairo the chemist and conservator Alfred Lucas, who set up a field laboratory in the empty tomb of Seti II nearby. Slowly the work of recording, conserving, and moving to Cairo the thousands of objects from the tomb got under way. It was a task that occupied Carter and his team for the next ten years. |
Within weeks of disturbing the tomb, on 5 April 1923, Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo of pneumonia following a septic mosquito bite. The legend of the 'curse of Tutankhamen' was born. Carter himself died some sixteen years later in his elegant London apartment close to Hyde Park, his retirement in England lonely and dogged by illness but his status in the archaeological pantheon secure for all time. |
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